So-called “dental floss” is well-known, the use of which is recommended by all dental technicians to their patients.
At the moment, one of the ways in which dental floss is made available to the public is spinning it around a spool, said spool being arranged in a small box provided with unwinding and cutting means. More precisely, the box is provided with a window, on an edge of which a small blade is applied, slightly raised at one end. In the ready-to-use package, the end of the dental floss coming out of the spool is caused to run through the window and is normally retained between the window edge and the blade; when a portion of floss must be used, it is pulled at said end, until the desired length is extracted, and then it is cut off causing it to rest on the cutting edge of the blade.
An original dental floss dispenser box is the one disclosed in Community Design registration no. 161815 in the name of the same Applicant.
Such a box normally consists of one or two components, which must be mutually mounted or coupled, for example in the form of housing and cover. This provides to manufacture two separate pieces and then to join them together, after having placed the floss spool between them. As can be guessed, this requires handling resources which are often dealt with by employing labour force.
US-A1-2003029472 discloses another type of container, wherein the two box components are hinged along a side edge, so as to allow the exit of an applicator from the upper surface.
These types of container are conceived as true complex applicators, suitable to last a long time to use a plurality of dental floss spools, which are gradually replaced when they are used up.
These types of containers are normally packaged and enclosed in a typical blister pack before they can be displayed for sale.
Consequently, there are additional packaging costs and a greater environmental impact due to package disposal.
The prior art offers also other types of disposable packages, simpler and more economical, which are suitable also for sales display but have other drawbacks. Some of such containers are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,512,634, U.S. Pat. No. 5,913,418 and EP-A1-0666224. These containers generally consist of a shaped portion of clear plastic material which acts as spool housing, coupled with a planar cardboard closing the package. These devices provide the use of material of different nature (plastics and cardboard) mutually coupled with adhesives, which implies the use of a gluing/joining station, as well as causing disposal problems.